It’s fun to see antiques put up for sale with low sale range estimates and see them hit prices 10-times what the auction house anticipated.  Harlowe-Powell put a very conservative $2,500 top range price on this set which proceeded to garner $23,000 plus buyers premium of 20%.

They were on the right track with an attribution of “possibly Jelliff or Herter” and the bidders agreed with the latter of the two which explains the final price.

I think that the set is most likely by Gustave Herter, dating to before his association with Christian when they became known as the “Herter Brothers”.  If this is a Gustave Herter piece, it would date to pre-1864 which is when the partnership started.

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In another installment of “For The Record” on Rare Victorian where I feature the work of low profile makers of the 19th Century, I’m pleased to present what I strongly believe is a Joseph W. Hamburger Prince of Wales chair.  An image from their ca. 1870 catalog below shows a model #33, “Prince of Wales” design.

I have been wanting to run across one of the Hamburger chairs in the flesh for some time now and luckily the opportunity arose on Ebay in the form of the one above.  It is currently up for sale and is listed as having been made by John Jelliff.  If this chair alone doesn’t teach us all to stop attributing all the carved female bust chairs to Jelliff, then nothing will.

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There are seven - count ‘em - seven “Pabst” pieces on Ebay right now and I wonder about how loosely the name is being bandied about for anything that resembles the style that he worked in.

British architect Bruce Talbert’s influential “Gothic Forms“, published in 1867, influenced many a maker at the time, including some to be mentioned below.  In addition to influences from the “influencers” such as Talbert, the makers themselves converged during the major exhibitions and saw what each other was working on.  Then there are the trade journals such as American Cabinetmaker that they all had copies of …

This exposure to architects, designers and other makers resulted in cross-pollination and propagation of stylistic elements that makes it unrealistic for us to whittle the list of likely makers down to the famous few and reuse their names over-and-over.  This why I will be doing more of the “For The Record” posts on this blog.

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